Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is estimated to affect 170 million individuals worldwide. This disease is primarily transmitted through contaminated blood products. Although its spread has been slowed as a result of improvement in blood screening in many countries, it remains the leading cause of liver disease-related deaths in the world. For example, it causes about 10,000 deaths annually in the U.S. alone. In the absence of effective therapies, the death rate is expected to triple over the next 2 decades.
Current treatments based on interferon-alpha have low success rates, particularly for genotype-1 infections predominant in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. Also, they are expensive and poorly received by patients. Thus, there is a need to develop better therapeutic agents for treating HCV infection.